Slumberland opens its first Experience Store in Malaysia
Hilding Anders’ operations in Malaysia span over several years. First established in 2008 when Hilding Anders completed the acquisition of Slumberland, the Company has focused on developing premium quality sleeping comfort for consumers over more than two decades. The main consumer touch point for the Malaysian is like most markets primarily at a brick-and-mortar bedding retailer.
The team in Malaysia has now taken a significant step and started a new chapter in the Slumberland journey with the grand opening of its first Experience Store in Malaysia.
Just like the name of the store, the purpose behind it is to provide sleepers in Malaysia with a full immersive experience of everything that the Slumberland brand has to offer the Malaysian market. With the experience store, Hilding Anders Malaysia can improve visibility for not only new products but all their bedding collections as well as their many accessories.
“We needed to have our own place, to display our full range, mattresses, bedframes, and accessories. The store also provides an excellent platform for us to test new products, promotional campaigns upfront to gauge consumer satisfaction from firsthand data.”, commented Marco Righi, Regional Managing Director for Hilding Anders Southeast-Asian business units.
Besides selling to end-users, dealers can come by the Slumberland Experience store to get ideas for new stores and business partners can interact with the brand in a different way.
“As a matter of fact, more dealers decided to open additional stores inspired by their visit to the Experience store. This is a great place for any existing and potential new dealer, to try all our products and decide which ones to display in their showroom. Furthermore, we also display export and contract models, so we invite our export distributors and hotel customer to experience the feeling our brand and products provide. It becomes a completely different experience compared to inviting them to our factory”, continued Marco Righi.
So where exactly can people find the recently opened Slumberland Experience store? It is located in the outskirt of Kuala Lumpur, in a city called Petaling Jaya.
“The peculiarity of the store is that we have two stores in one. Slumberland at the ground floor and Vono on the first floor, so basically, we have two stores in one location. The ambientes are completely separated and we promote the two stores separately, the two brands are naturally treated as two different entities”, said Marco Righi.
Vono, the sister brand to Slumberland, focuses on more mid-segment products from a price point POV. All its mattresses use the exclusive and technologically advanced “Intalok Springing System” developed with high technology for healthy and refreshing sleep with particular focus on back-care.
As of today, the feedback from both dealers and end consumers has been very positive.
“The store has been perceived very well; we don’t compete with our dealers since we don’t run any price promotions. The purpose of the store is to one the one hand a way for us to venture into DTC, but just as importantly is that we want to continue our cooperation with dealers and help them to open their stores and can draw inspiration from the Experience store. Our dealers will always be the priority”, said Marco Righi.
The team behind the project
From its inception, this project has been an excellent demonstration of what is possible through close collaboration and teamwork. None in the organization had any experience of opening a DTC store and it has thus been a collective learning experience. And as of today, the average ticket in the store is quite high and combined with a revitalized marketing approach foot traffic in the store continues to grow.
To be continued…